Why are you doing that?

I'm sitting in my living room in my bra and underpants, eating warm cake out of a frying pan. Intermittently, I yell something about the opressive heat. The thermostat in my living room says that it is 94 degrees in here. I am dripping sweat. It is more than disgusting. I have nothing to drink but warm iced tea, because the ice lives in the kitchen, where the oven is on, and it is probably five million degrees. Sweat is running into my ears and making them itch. It is running into my eyelashes and eyebrows, and into the cake.

I can't tell if I'm crying or my eyeballs are sweating.

I am eating cake with a knife. It is warm. It is gross and chemical tasting. It is from a mix. It makes me deeply unhappy. It is in a nonstick frying pan with a plastic handle. It has cream filling and strawberry glaze. It tastes like strawberry fruit pies and preservatives.

If you came in my front door right now, you'd ask "Why are you doing that?"

It is a very, very long story. A story that, conveniently, will sum up everything that has happened since I left my job one month and three days ago.

You see, about a month ago, my boyfriend and I went on vacation to lovely, beautiful Delaware. A woman from his work, who is a generous and charming and altogether wonderful individual, agreed to watch his difficult, neurotic, obstinent, truculent (witty and delightful) parrot, Hakeem. For this service, all she asked in return was baked goods.

Immediately after I returned from Delaware, my boyfriend went back to work. With the lovely woman, whom we'll call Baimee. The lovely woman wondered where her baked goods were. He, I'm sure, told her, that I was still on vacation, and as soon as I was back, I would get on it.

I got back on Monday, after three weeks on the cape and one weekend in New York, taping an improvisational comedy program called "A Lush In Rio". Which is an anagram for hilarious. Actually, it's an anagram for hilarious n. On monday, it was too hot to cook. So I packed.

Because, you see, I'm moving in a few weeks. And I'm moving somewhere where I can't bring all my shit. I have so many dishes I'd have to start running a beginner plate spinning class or go orthodox kosher to use them all. I have pots and pans and books and furniture. Tons of furniture. I had to double the size of my storage space to put it all away.

So on Monday, I boxed up most of my kitchen, started to sort through my clothes and books, and bought ingredients for what I consider one of my tastiest recipes: Chocolate chocolate caramel cheesecake brownies. And I called my boyfriend and I told him that the next day I would bake Baimee's brownies, and drive them to him, and he could give them to her on wednesday morning.

"Brownies?" he said. " I thought you were going to bake her a cake. She's intrigued by your bake'n'fill cake pan ."

"Well, I already have the ingredients for brownies."

"Bake her a bake n fill cake. I'll reimburse you."

"Ok" I said. Not remembering that the bake n' fill bake set was already packed. And hauled. To the back of my storage space. Down the street. And not remembering that he couldn't reimburse me for anything, because I lost my ATM card. And thus, couldn't buy anything after I spent my last twenty dollars on gas home from Providence, brownie ingredients, and a box of generic cereal.

But I'm a game girl. So Tuesday morning, , I went down to my storage space. If it was five million degrees at my apartment, it was fifty million at the storage space. But I moved boxes, and I found my bake-n-fill. And I brought it home.

Wednesday morning I finished packing up my living room stuff, except for my furniture and my computer. I have pounds and pounds of books and dvds sorted into boxes for storage and for law school. And then I started baking a cake. I don't have any cake ingredients, remember, so I started making a boxed cake mix that included filling and glaze. Then I opened my bake n fill.

There's a pan missing. The most important pan. Without the base pan, it's a bake n fall the fuck out. And I know why it's missing. It's missing because when I made the titty cake, the titty cake was in it. So the base pan didn't get put back into the box with the other pan. It got put somewhere else. Somewhere deeper in storage

I had an "I'm a genius!" moment. I poured the batter for the base into a non-stick frying pan, knowing that like all "I'm a genius" moments, this would end in tragedy. I took my shirt off, because it was boiling hot once the oven was on. Then I realized that- the bake and fill cake pan requires two boxes of cake mix. Because it's like a four layer cake. It's big. I only had one box of cake mix. So when I filled the dome pan, it didn't fill very much.

You can see where this is going. The cake in the frying pan cooked in twenty minutes, just before the plastic handle of the frying pan started to blister. The cake in the dome pan did not form a dome. It formed- a dimple. I gamely tried to assemble the cake anyway. The dimple broke in half when I tried to get it out of the pan. It didn't even cover the cream filling.

This cake was no reward for a person who has spent a week feeding and caring for an animal as emotionally manipulative and noisy as Hakeem.

At this point, I was so sweaty that my bra began to slide around, my shoes were mooshy, and my pants were off. I had every fan in the house in the kitchen, but it just blew the hot around. But I could not let Baimee down! No! Because I am stubborn! Because I have a sense of justice!

Because I make poor decisions and had to distract myself from the fact that I had just signed promissory notes for loans totally 42,000 dollars.

So I started baking my chocolate chocolate caramel cheesecake brownies. Which I will give to Baimee. Well, I'll give them to my boyfriend to give to Baimee. And began, while they were baking, to sit, in my underpants, eat the failed cake (which I just now gave up eating and threw out) and sweat into the loveseat.